Jeff Wall's Unique Photographic Vision
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MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY Jeff Wall’s Unique Photographic Vision With a show of new work opening at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, the elusive photographer Jeff Wall opens up about his singular process By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz (September 4, 2015) CLOSE UP | Jeff Wall at work. PHOTO: JESSE CHEHAK FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE ONE HUNDRED MILES into the desert north of Los Angeles, at the intersection of two crumbling roads that are slowly re-assimilating into the ruddy, sunbaked earth, a flimsy, black folding umbrella—the kind that sells for $7 at a drugstore—fends off the high-noon rays from its perch on a metal stand. Beneath its shade, a tall man in a blue dress shirt and black jeans climbs onto a ladder, oblivious to the 85-degree heat. He peers through binoculars, concentrating intently on two land surveyors working about 15 yards in front of him and, beyond, the scrubland extending to the horizon. The binoculars are balanced atop an accordion-like, oversize black camera. After a moment, the man triggers the shutter by squeezing a small piston with a precise flicking motion that calls to mind Roger Federer’s net game. Then he lifts his head, runs his fingers through his chin-length gray hair and removes the exposed sheet of film from the camera before sliding in another. “Rotate one inch to your right,” he directs the surveyor who is kneeling and facing him. He pauses. “There. Let’s go for it.” This is Canadian photographer Jeff Wall patiently pursuing his prey—the fleeting instant when a surveyor’s hammer rises and begins to fall toward a metal stake in the ground—attempting to capture the precise moment when nature is transformed into property. But unlike generations of photographers who, for the most part, recorded human experience as it unfolded before them ( Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans and Robert Frank among them), Wall painstakingly stages the scenes he shoots. This particular tableau is based on a memory fragment that has been percolating in his mind for a while. To enact it, he found this spot on the outskirts of California City (orienting his Linhof Master Technika camera away from two bluffs that were new york paris london www.mariangoodman.com MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY dismissed as “too picturesque”) and hired the two surveyors, Art and Joe, who are assiduously marking the same patch of dirt over and over again. Today, the third day of the shoot, Wall works between noon and 1:30 p.m., when the “hot desert light” is at its most dramatic. From the approximately 120 essentially identical images that will result, a mere handful will be deemed “right.” And after a period of months, only one will be processed—Wall oversees this himself, after years of frustration with labs—and blown up to a single print. In October, it will practically take over an entire wall of his longtime gallerist Marian Goodman’s New York headquarters, as part of his first show of new work there in nearly four years. (Her London gallery will also show Wall’s new work, beginning on October 29.) “When Jeff’s pictures succeed, they succeed in a way that nobody else’s do—it’s a kind of art that no one else practices,” says Peter Galassi, the former chief curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who co-curated a traveling retrospective of Wall’s work in 2007. “It’s the willingness to go so far based on, well, intuition.” Wall, 68, refers to his approach as “cinematography” or “near-documentary,” and has been practicing this technique since the ’70s, when his epically proportioned, realist work first wrested attention away from the die-hard conceptualists. His opening salvo was 1978’s The Destroyed Room, an image of a woman’s trashed bedroom that referenced Romantic-era painter Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus. Since then Wall has been credited with shifting the course of photography itself—as well as art history—with his luminous, oversize images of deceptively quotidian scenes that often make allusions to everything from canvases by old masters to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. His work has influenced legions of photographers (including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff) as well as musicians like Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth and Sia, who for her memorable performance in February at the Grammys replicated the hundreds of light bulbs and humble apartment setting of Wall’s seminal 1999–2000 work, After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue. “I seek to create a kind of magical realism in my work, and his work has that feeling,” she says. OPEN ROAD | Property Line, a new work by Jeff Wall showing next month. ‘I am interested in the line between land as nature and land as property,’ he says. PHOTO:‘PROPERTY LINE’ BY JEFF WALL new york paris london www.mariangoodman.com MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY Although he works in a medium that is mechanized, replicable and ephemeral—many photographic prints are unstable and have a shelf life between a decade and 30 years unless they are preserved in museum-quality conditions—Wall has advanced the notion that photography can be as singular and permanent as great painting, or even literature. Meanwhile, he has embraced technological advances and unusual formats—most notably in the late ’70s when he began using light boxes like those from bus-stop advertisements to display his work (a practice he has since discontinued). Such artistic mastery has earned him the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (also bestowed on Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston and Nan Goldin); and, in addition to being shown at MoMA, his work was the subject of a 2005 retrospective at London’s Tate Modern. A major exhibition of nearly 40 of Wall’s masterpieces recently made its final stop at Denmark’s avant-garde Louisiana Museum. “Photography had never gotten its due as an art form, but he was one of the people who contributed greatly to its acceptance,” says Goodman. “He worked against the grain to develop the photographic genres into areas that it had utterly rejected or ignored,” says Sheena Wagstaff, chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary art department, who also curated the Tate Modern show, along with Theodora Vischer, then at Basel’s Schaulager. “Now, globally, he has really affected the way people see the world through the lens.” Wall remains something of an artist’s artist, despite all the admiration, the accolades and the soaring prices. (A 1992 photomontage, Dead Troops Talk, sold for $3.7 million at Christie’s in 2012, a record for Wall’s work at auction.) “I’m not that much of a public artist—people wouldn’t find me that interesting,” he says. “I’m just my work.” Wall adds, wryly: “Sometimes I discuss it until people’s eyes start glazing over—and then, at that point, I stop.” When he is not talking about his work, Wall is immersed in it, describing his mentality as “hovering—just trying to be alert, trying to be attentive.” During the ride back to Los Angeles (where he spends three months of the year with his wife, Jeannette, whom he married in 1967), a fellow passenger whips out an iPhone to identify a roadside landmark.“What happened to just wondering?” Wall playfully chastises. For him, the contemplation of an idea is as important as the finished product: A concept might gestate in the back of his mind for years before he decides to develop it further. “Photography is supposed to be instantaneous, and I have nothing against that,” he says later. “But for me, the plasticity of the process, where things turn into something else, comes from the time I spend on it.” Over the course of a year, Wall might make only three or four images, with production costs that can sometimes run as high as $100,000 apiece. For one shoot, he meticulously reconstructed a nightclub’s gated exterior inside a studio, down to the gum stuck to the sidewalk. (Wall calls it a replica, not a set, because the latter implies illusion; “In films or theater, a brick wall could be painted canvas, or it could be plastic bricks. I don’t do that, unless I wanted it to look that way,” he notes.) On another shoot, he hired a woman to live for months in the apartment where he would eventually photograph her. To add verisimilitude to the cellar apartment in After “Invisible Man”, now part of MoMA’s permanent collection, he and his assistants prepared food on a countertop, though any traces of their efforts are barely visible in new york paris london www.mariangoodman.com MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY the final image. Such precision has earned him the label “control freak” from some critics, a description that makes the mild-mannered Wall bristle. “It’s not a very good term, because it means that you are applying control that’s excessive,” he says. “Was Mozart a control freak because he wrote every note of his music? What should he do, write only some of the notes? Well, John Cage thought that, and then you have the Cageian idea of chance music, which is cool, and Mozart, also cool. So who’s the control freak, and what does it matter?” Wall’s brain is a compendium of art historical and cultural knowledge—if his mind is a memory palace, his canonical references form the foundation, the walls, the floor. “I make [my pictures] for my next attempt to say something about my relation to the canon of art,” he says.